Blame it on the kabaddi

Too popular by half

The blog has lightly dealt with the sporting underperformance of India on the global stage before. The level of analysis you come to expect from this source was again on display with your correspondent’s flippant explanation that “too much cricket” was the cause of India winning one medal per 190,198,333 adults at the 2008 Olympics. As 2007 Twenty20 World Champions, the Indian public probably didn’t mind too much. However, despite being the current ODI World Champs, there was a reported dissatisfaction with being left in the shade by Grenada et al at the recent London Games.

In winning only six medals, none of them gold, India again grossly underachieved. A country on the rise is no longer willing to tolerate such humiliation. Cricket, clearly, takes up the focus, time and attention of a large swathe of active Indian youngsters. But, could other – non-global – sports also be to blame for absorbing potential Olympic talent? As I rack my brain for answers to that conundrum my mind dredges up what, at first, appears an obvious explanation: it’s all the fault of kabaddi.

A failed kabaddi player, earlier

Back in 1992 the Channel 4 programme (imaginatively titled Kabaddi) impressed upon this pre-teen that the sport was the pre-eminent time-filler for young men all across the vast nation on India. There were no barriers of entry to a populace often without the means to invest in sporting equipment. Sport in its purest form; may the best man win (actually, kabaddi is hugely popular amongst the fairer sex too).

1992 was a halcyon period for Channel 4, with their renowned Football Italia transmitting the exotic Serie A to a football public largely starved of live action in the wake of Sky hoovering up the rights to the English top flight. But, for some, the Sunday morning Kabaddi was the pinnacle of foreign sporting fare; the heavyweight clash of West Bengal Police versus the Punjab more than matching Lazio versus Sampdoria, etc.

For a sport which seems to closely resemble the Olympic event of wresting (freestyle and Greco-Roman) India won only one silver and a solitary bronze at the 2012 Games. Surely this is an avenue for further exploration by the Indian Olympic Association in its pursuit of more metal. Either that or outlaw it altogether and give the nation a chance to produce world class sailors and gymnasts.

Olympinomics

This morning I wasted my time in the office crunching some numbers in Excel. The futility of me quantifying Olympic success against socio-economic indicators is underlined by the existence of so many similar analyses already, i.e. this Olympic Medal Count by Population and GDP.

However, I wanted to see how success (measured by all medals, not just gold) could be weighed against adult population and their purchasing power parity (PPP) – often cited as a more accurate descriptor of countries’ relative wealth than the more standard GDP per capita.

Hence this post, timed two weeks before the London 2012 opening ceremony. I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of the data analysis. All you need to know is that it would in no way stand up to the rigours of an independent audit, not least as I’m comparing data from different years (medals from 2008; population and PPP data from various latest figures).

Firstly, Graph 1 shows the top ten medal winning countries from Beijing 2008, ranked (conventionally) in order of total medals:

Graph 1: Top ten medal rankings from the 2008 Beijing Olympics

Secondly, Graph 2 shows the top ten ‘medalling’ countries from Beijing divided by the total adult population in each country. The numbers beside each country are the overall ranking across all medalling countries. The top three (not shown in the graph) are: Jamaica (one medal per 134,364 adults), Iceland (194,000) and New Zealand (297,556). India came 78^th and last with one medal per 190,198,333 adults. A bit too much cricket, perhaps.

Graph 2: Top ten medal winning countries from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, in order of adults per medal

Graph 3 shows quite clearly how big populations can equate with Olympic success. Sorry, India.

Graph 3: Adult populations of the top ten medal winning countries from the 2008 Beijing Olympics

Graph 4 shows the number of medals per adult purchasing power parity (PPP), in US dollars. Though China was bottom of Graph 2, here they’ve shot to the top and are ranked no. 1 overall. So, while China underperforms relative to the size of population, they make up for it in their ability to translate wealth into Olympic success. We can summise that if they can distribute their resources across the whole country they will be an unstoppable force.

Graph 4: Top ten medal winning countries from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, in order of PPP per medal

It’s often suggested that wealth (and population) are key determinants of Olympic success. Just glancing at the top ten countries list seems to support this, with nine of the G20 represented (Ukraine being the gatecrasher). However, Graph 5 plots these ten countries’ PPP in order of their placings in the top ten medals table, and no clear correlation is found from this (imperfect) sample:

Graph 5: PPP in order of overall medal rankings from the 2008 Beijing Olympics

As already demonstrated in Graph 4, China, Russia and Ukraine punch far above their weight (as measured in PPP).

Right, back to work.